If you're a fan of Rainbow Six Siege on PlayStation 4, you may want to shelve your copy for now. A group of Rainbow Six Siege players are reporting that a new update for the game is crippling their systems, even going so far is some cases as to corrupt hard drives. The situation, as you can probably guess, is leaving a bunch of frustrated PS4 owners in its wake.
At IFA 2017 late last month, Sony unveiled its second attempt at putting out a flagship for the second half of the year. And this time, Sony almost gets the formula right. Well, almost. The Xperia XZ1 is now ready for purchase in the US, unlocked and from Amazon, and it rightly doesn’t carry the high price of the Xperia XZ Premium launched a few months back. Sadly, Sony continues to deprive its US customers with a feature that has become more or less standard on any smartphone, to the extent that even Apple has been criticized for removing it. Yes, it still doesn’t support a fingerprint sensor.
If a report from South Korea proves true, the next smartphone spec race is not on quality, but on speed. The report suggests that Samsung is set to create its own 3-layer image sensor that's able to utilize DRAM to snap and process photos faster than ever before. Faster than any smartphone camera's ever allowed in the past, that is to say.
It would seem that Sony's aversion to cross play between the Xbox One and the PS4 has come to an end. This whole saga first began when Rocket League developer Psyonix suggested that enabling cross play between the two consoles would be a simple endeavor, with Sony turning around and denying such a move. Ever since then, Sony has declined to open up cross play between the two consoles at every turn.
Because of the limits of technology, we are sometimes forced to choose our battles and settle for compromises. That’s true for smartphones and it’s true for digital cameras as well. Super zoom? Yes, you can have that, but you’ll have to settle for less than speedy performance. Sony, however, is saying that you can have your cake and eat it too, so to speak. The latest addition to its Cyber-shot family, the RX10 IV, boasts of a few firsts. But its real claim to fame is combining a 24-600 mm lens with fast autofocus and fast tracking in a single camera.
Every so often we hear of new home projectors that have nearly the same mantra: small but powerful. But let’s face it. Short throw and pico projectors don’t even come close to the brightness and capabilities of dedicated home theater projectors. At the same time, however, few will be able to afford or make room for such hulking boxes in their houses. Sony’s new entry level VPL-VW285ES and mid-level VPL-VW385ES try to bridge the gap, offering an immersive viewing experience at the price of one whole table.
Sony hasn't really been hitting out of the park with its limited edition DualShock 4 controllers lately. Whether it's the Destiny 2 controller planned to launch alongside the game or the limited edition PlayStation FC DualShock 4, the designs Sony has been churning out lately have been generally uninspired. That all changed today, however, with the reveal of Sony's new DualShock 4 crystal collection.
The action camera space might seem crowded right now, not to mention commoditized, but Sony believes it has something sufficiently different. That's the promise of high-end optics in a segment more commonly associated with ruggedness and ease of use, with Sony partnering up with Zeiss for the lenses on its new RX0 camera. However, it's not only GoPro that should be worried.
Sometimes the very simplest features are those you come to appreciate most of all. Sony clearly got that memo, anyway, hence the one basic piece of tech on its new LF-S50G smart speaker which, though not as clever as the Google Assistant, still elevates the gadget above its increasingly numerous rivals. That advantage? A clock.
Sony unveiled a couple of new products at IFA 2017 yesterday, including two expected Xperia flagship and one odd and unexpected Android mid-ranger. While the Xperia XZ1 and Xperia XZ1 Compact are more or less flagship phones, there was a bit of uncertainty whether it will ship with Oreo or not, considering how close it was to Android 8.0’s launch. Beating LG to the punch this year, Sony proudly said that those two will launch with Oreo from the get go. Even better, Sony is sharing which smartphones will get updated to Android 8.0 in due time.
If you thought the Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact was thick, wait til you get a load of the new Walkman NW-ZX300. Then again, this is no phone, so not only does it not need to bend a knee to smartphone conventions, it can actually go even thicker for the sake of better audio quality. That is precisely what’s happening inside the NW-ZX300, where every piece and design element, down to the wiring, is made for delivering the best audio experience possible on a portable media player.
Officially speaking, Google Home is the only smart speaker that houses Google Assistant. Other speakers and devices usually only get Google’s smart assistant after the fact or as an added feature. Google Home is, of course, far from perfect and it could do with a second iteration, which is probably unlikely to happen. Fortunately there is now the Sony LF-S50G which was made and designed specifically for Google Assistant, built with the lessons learned from Google Home and other smart speakers now filling the market.
